We have two separate but identical WD MyBook 2TB external hard drives. One is mine, and one is my wifes. Typically we switch between the two on my computer due to a shortage of USB ports. When I am done with one, I will power down my computer, unplug it, and plug in the other. One is NTFS, the other is FAT32. Both have the same label, i.e. “My Book”
Recently I had an issue where after I powered down and rebooted to swap the devices, the old (FAT32) device was still showing up as my E: drive on my Windows 10 desktop in File Explorer, along with the top level directory list. This did not make sense to me, as the NTFS drive was clearly plugged in. However I could not drill down obviously, without getting an error, as what was really connected was the NTFS drive, not the FAT32 drive. It seems to me that Windows 10 was somehow ‘caching’ this when it shouldn’t have been.
Now after rebooting, and unplugging and plugging back in, when I look at the E: drive, the NTFS drive label and top level directory are all garbage, (i.e. text that makes absolutely no sense) and it says the type is ‘FAT32’ instead of NTFS !
I think somehow the MBR or something got overwritten or corrupted, since the computer was still displaying the info for the old FAT32 drive that was previously plugged in before it turned it into gargage. Is there way to restore that info, and recover the data on my NTFS drive ? Just for kicks I tried using ‘diskpart’ to set the partition type on that disk to 07x (NTFS) instead of FAT32, but that didn’t appear to make any difference. It still shows up as FAT32, and still everything looks weird.
If someone could help I would greatly appreciate it !
